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“... If All Those Tomorrows follows the trail of an uncontrollable id, Confessions of a Failed Southern Lady is the memoir of a serenely self-aware ego. Florence King grew up in an obsessively obstetrical atmosphere, but was encouraged to rebel by her drily intellectual father. Traditional Virginian femininity, she concluded at a relatively tender age, meant ...”

“... account of Livia, the Emperor’s wife: this rehabilitation, he urges, should ‘rescue that great lady from the vile calumnies fathered on her grandson Claudius by the fecund imagination of the late Robert Graves, itself infected by the most scurrilous rumour-mongers of Ancient Rome’. Unfortunately, the great lady seems ...”

“... comes as a mopping-up operation covering the rest of his life. It does not rerun the ‘Lady Chatterley’ trial, about which he published a book, or deal at length with his favourite editor, Kingsley Martin, whose biography he wrote. There is no law against writing one’s life twice over, if there is good ore still to be delved, but it can mean ...”

“... Beaverbrook died the newspapers passed – with unfortunate results – to his formidable widow, Lady Beaverbrook, and to his son, Sir Max Aitken. The reader will have spotted that even in my fantasies I harboured no prissy ideas about editorial independence. My vision of owning a newspaper was that it would say what I wanted it to say about the great issues ...”

“... of the Mellor affair. The excuse offered by the People’s editor – that Mr Mellor had told his lady friend that their nocturnal encounters were making him too tired to write his speeches, and that this made the story a legitimate matter of public interest – is frankly ludicrous. If that were the case, it would not just be the right but the duty of every ...”

“... England as a country (not the country) of her own. The Furies can be read as another Portrait of a Lady, the representation of a young woman essentially on her own coping with the experience of existing in divided and distinguished worlds. Hobhouse’s Helen, like James’s Isabel Archer, is perpetually an alien. But there are big differences from the James ...”

“... as Oban. It’s here that we’re introduced to the sopranos of the fifth-year choir of Our Lady of Perpetual Succour’s School for Girls: the naturally aristocratic Fionnula (the Cooler); Orla, who is dying of Hodgkin’s disease and has undergone the traumas of radiotherapy and Lourdes; Chell, who adores animals; Manda, who lives with her father some ...”

“... by domestic objects. Sometimes they are reading, as in her two paintings of the early 1910s, A Lady Reading and Girl Reading at the Window (Quinn’s first acquisition). The lady has a face like ‘a vierge of Dürer’, John said; the girl has John’s own face. Sometimes her women hold a piece of sewing, or a cat. The ...”

“... began indeed as a writer, under the name not of Ernest Jones but of ‘Karl’. He was taken up by Lady Stepney, an elderly novelist of society, whose husband had held a place at the perpetual whist-playing, dog-and-monkey-cluttered but amiable court of the Duke of York. Through her, he found a publisher for his first novel, The Wood Sprite, in which a former ...”

“... watch, he is pardoned and not hanged by the neck for the murder he didn’t commit. The inevitable Lady Mary exhibits her spoiled nature and then learns her lesson several times in each season, and the irredeemably wicked footman and his spiteful lady’s maid accomplice get their comeuppance and revert to type so frequently ...”

“... in English history, the culmination of long-term plotting spearheaded by his formidable mother, Lady Margaret Beaufort, the most successful politician in 15th-century England. Her role, largely forgotten for centuries and thrillingly rediscovered by Michael Jones and Malcolm Underwood in The King’s Mother (1992), might usefully have played a greater part ...”

“... suggests identification as well as ironic distance between Sidney and Astrophil. Sidney’s niece Lady Mary Wroth retold fictional versions of her unhappy marriage and her adulterous affair with her cousin over and over again in both the framing and inset narratives of her prose romance Urania. Admittedly, none of these was a writer for the public stage ...”

“... to be regretted; no novelist of the present time has a title to such public commendation as that lady; Her characters are drawn with originality of Design, & strength of Colouring, & her Morality is of the purest & most elevated sort.’ At times like these, Burney’s anxiety, even panic, revived the trauma of the publication of Evelina, when her attempt to ...”

“... to the size of the carrier; a fair comparison would be a five-coach train carrying one old lady to the seaside. Though the people of England saw little or nothing of the October rout, they had already witnessed zeppelins blazing like bonfires in the night sky. Bertrand Russell, spending his first night with a new mistress, was roused by ‘a bestial ...”

“... was sent to work as a servant, to teach her humility, but rebelled on the grounds that she was a lady. After many setbacks Maynard wondered whether the girl suffered from ‘moral idiocy’, blameable perhaps on that Italian streak in her parentage. Sent to an orphan-training school, Effie was found in bed teaching other girls ‘filthy and disgusting ...”